Inside Jeff Bezos' Mysterious Private World

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01/11/2019

Getty Images; Melissa Herwitt/E! Illustration

If there’s one thing everybody knows about Jeff Bezos, it’s that he’s obscenely rich. He has the kind of fortune that is too mind-boggling to exist in physical dollars and cents, but rather just takes up a line on a piece of paper at the money manager’s office.

He’s the richest man in the world, in fact, according to the last time Forbes counted in March 2018. (In July 2018 his fortune was up to a reported $147 million, and this week a Forbes expert estimated $136 billion, as the number rises and falls accordingly with the price of his 80 million Amazon shares.)

Even if the name Bezos hasn’t been on your radar, it’s extremely likely you have contributed to his ever-growing wealth as the founder of Amazon, online retail behemoth turned as close to an instant answer to your prayers that you’re likely to get (especially if you’re praying for shoes, dish soap and pet food to appear all at once, and you asked a woman named Alexa, who lives in a little box in your home, to make it happen).

But while Jeff Bezos is a legend in the online commerce and disrupter worlds, and a famous face as a political donor and philanthropist, a Hollywood mover and shaker, and the owner of the Washington Post (or the “Amazon Washington Post,” as the president of the United States likes to smear it), he hasn’t become your friendly neighborhood billionaire like Warren Buffett, the face of eradicating malaria like Bill Gates or an enigmatic man in black holding the future in the palm of his hand, like the late Steve Jobs. He’s even far from the most outsize personality in the race to commercialize space travel, with Richard Branson and Elon Musk battling for that title.

So where does Bezos fit into this tapestry of unique characters and unfathomable wealth?

In his 2013 book The Everything Store, author Brad Stone calls Bezos a man who has “proved quite indifferent to the opinion of others…an avid problem solver, a man who has a chess grandmaster’s view of the competitive landscape.” He is a congenial and outgoing guy with a famously big laugh (“like a cross between a mating elephant seal and a power tool,” Stone writes), but prone to the same mercurial behavior associated with Jobs, friendly one minute and liable to cut a person down to size the next.

The name Amazon, as in the world’s largest river, reflected Bezos’ mighty ambition—and, starting with “A,” would be near the top of any alphabetical company listing.

Bezos is both the face of Amazon, and someone who lets the very existence of Amazon speak for itself. For instance, he didn’t even attend the groundbreaking ceremony at the company’s massive Lake Union headquarters in 2009, though the mayor of Seattle and governor of Washington did.

But there’s the myth and there’s the man. And there’s no amount of money in the world, including most of the money in the United States, that can keep people from being interested in the very human travails of a person who, most of the time, seems to be living life on an entirely separate plane than the rest of us.

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Bezos, 54, and his wife of 25 years, author and philanthropist MacKenzie Bezos, announced this week that they are getting divorced. They have four children together; an estimated 400,000 acres of property; the aforementioned billions; and, according to TMZ, no prenuptial agreement.

Bit of a rookie mistake, but they married the year before he founded Amazon in the garage of their rented Seattle home, in 1994. Who knew?

And even more in the category of your average celebrity travails, it turns out Bezos already has a girlfriend, veteran TV personality and former Good Day LA co-host Lauren Sánchez—who’s still married to, but is reportedly separated from, Patrick Whitesell, the co-CEO of mega-agency WME.

Whitesell and Bezos have known each other for years, and multiple reports say Whitesell introduced his wife and his friend, suggesting a film collaboration.

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Sanchez is also a helicopter pilot who has her own aerial filming company, Black Ops Aviation. In a strange coincidence, Bezos survived a helicopter crash on March 6, 2003, when the pilot hit a tree while taking them in for a landing near his family’s Texas ranch. The copter rolled and landed in a creek; Bezos emerged with cuts on his head but otherwise unscathed.

“People say that your life races before your eyes,” he told Fast Company the next year. “This particular accident happened slowly enough that we had a few seconds to contemplate it.” Bezos continued, laughing heartily, “I have to say, nothing extremely profound flashed through my head in those few seconds. My main thought was, This is such a silly way to die.

Us Weekly reported Thursday that Whitesell was blindsided to find out his wife was having a relationship with Bezos. In the meantime, Bezos and Sanchez’s purported sexy text exchanges have already somehow been obtained for public viewing. An attorney for Bezos told the National Enquirer, which first published the texts, that it was “widely known” that his client and MacKenzie were “long separated.” A source also told Page Six, “MacKenzie knew they were dating, the news [Wednesday] was not a surprise to her. Lauren was with Jeff at the Golden Globes because they are dating.”

Bezos, Sanchez and Whitesell were all spotted chatting at Amazon’s Golden Globes after-party on Sunday, according to People.

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“As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends,” read a joint statement that Bezos tweeted out Wednesday, in the rarest of comments about his personal life.

“We feel incredibly lucky to have found each other and deeply grateful for every one of the years we have been married to each other. If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again. We’ve had such a great life together as a married couple, and we also see wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures. Though the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain friends.”

We could say that they certainly have the luxury of having an amicable split, but history has shown that rich doesn’t necessarily equal civilized. So, fingers crossed for all involved, that the end result is as nice as that statement.

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“I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year,” Bezos recounted in the 2010 Princeton commencement address. “I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that.”

So in the summer of 1994, Bezos and his wife flew to Texas, where his parents lived. They told the movers to just start driving west, that they would follow up with an exact destination—which, at the moment, they weren’t sure of yet.

Jackie and Miguel Bezos (who also goes by Mike) loaned the couple the SUV in which MacKenzie drove them to Seattle, while Bezos worked on his laptop. They didn’t have any particular personal ties to the city, but a friend had recommended it—and at the time online retailers didn’t have to collect sales tax in states where they didn’t have a physical presence. Washington was small and he wanted the rest of his customers around the country to avoid paying sales tax.

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“I want you to know how risky this is,” Jeff told them, according to remarks Mike Bezos gave in 2015 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, “because I want to come home at dinner for Thanksgiving and I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

According to Bloomberg, their stake in the company may now be worth about $30 billion—a 12 million percent return. Bezos’ younger siblings, Mark and Christina, also purchased 30,000 shares apiece for $10,000 in 1996; each holding could be worth $640 million.

“We were fortunate enough that we have lived overseas [they had just spent three years in Bogotá, Colombia] and we have saved a few pennies so we were able to be an angel investor,” Mike, a former engineer at Exxon, said. “The rest is history.”